Meet The Filmmaker — Sara Terry
What is it about film that you are the most passionate about? In other words, why film and why documentary?
As a first-time filmmaker, who’s coming into this field at mid-career (after starting as a print and public radio journalist, and then becoming a photographer), I can’t say that I’ve been passionate about docs all my life, or that I’ve always wanted to direct/produce a doc.
But I have always been passionate about social justice issues, and over the past decade, I’ve become deeply involved in post-conflict issues. I didn’t expect to direct this documentary; for me, it began as a still photography project. But what’s happened over the last two years, as we’ve worked, is that I’ve completely fallen in love with the medium of film – including the capacity it has to create a world that viewers come to inhabit, and also the outreach it has in terms of bringing an issue to a broad audience (far more than anything else I’ve ever done including writing a cover piece for the New York Times Magazine, and also creating a photo book about the aftermath of war in Bosnia).
So, I guess the answer is that I’m passionate about exploring issues that give us a better understanding of what it means to be human, that re-frame how we think about possibilities for justice and social change. And what I’ve discovered is that documentary filmmaking is easily the most satisfying medium I’ve worked in, as a way of articulating and exploring those issues.
Which artists have inspired you the most in your life/career?
Again, I can’t cite doc world artists who’ve inspired me the most (though I’ve immersed myself in documentaries over the past few years and have a deep admiration for many of the greats who would top any doc filmmakers best-of list). But my main inspirations come from other places – as a photographer, I’ve been most influenced by the Old Masters, and their use of light, color and gesture; as a writer/journalist, I’m always amazed by the work of Lawrence Wechsler; and as someone who’s also worked in public radio, and understood the influence of sound and music in storytelling, I’m deeply inspired by works like Gorecki’s Symphony No 5 and its heart-wrenching exploration of the depths of human despair and the endurance of hope, and also by the brilliance of my ex-husband, guitarist Reeves Gabrels, who helped me understand the dramatic curve that can be achieved through tension and release. As for doc influences, right now I’m learning from every documentary I watch.
Who do you hope your film will reach when it’s complete? What kind of impact do you hope to have?
I hope Fambul Tok reaches a wide general audience and causes people to do two things:
1. Consider the power of forgiveness in their own lives.
2. See Africa in a different light – not as a place that needs to be “saved” by the West, but as a place that has answers to its problems, and lessons that the West can learn from.
On a more specific level, I hope the film continues to be part of a conversation that it has already been part of in the post-conflict international policy community – which is having to address its failures in helping create sustainable peace in many post-conflict countries, particularly in Africa. I hope the film helps inspire a humility in a community that all too often seems to think it has all the answers, and that only the Western way of doing things is the right one.
I bring more than 20 years of experience as a journalist – in newspapers, magazines, and public radio – to the story-telling aspect of the film. The narrative reflects my own conviction as a journalist that great stories move deep beneath the surface of traditional “conflict-driven” approaches, and that deeply moving, engaging story-telling evolves through exploring layers of emotions and ideas as felt, articulated and experienced by the story’s characters.
The end result, I hope, will be a movie that doesn’t allow a viewer to sit back and “watch” the film – but draws them in to experience a world they’ve never encountered before, a world that values the wholeness of community and the restoration of relationships over revenge and punishment, a world the viewer will contemplate long after the movie ends.
What’s the best advice someone has ever given you? About filmmaking or in life in general?
It wasn’t really advice, per se, but I was raised with a very strong conviction of the goodness that is inherent in people – and to keep believing in that goodness, no matter how much evidence piles up to the contrary.